• When Should I Check The Mail? - I love how extra this is. Who writes an hour long article about when to check the mail? In reading the whole thing (over multiple sittings) I learned a surprising amount about statistics. Who knew there was more than just a normal distribution? Life is wild. I'm glad we've got people like this in it to keep things strange.

Bayesian decision-theoretic analysis of local mail delivery times: modeling deliveries as survival analysis, model comparison, optimizing check times with a loss function, and optimal data collection.

• The entrepreneurial state - Geography and history capture me more and more because of the fact below. Where you grow up determines so much of our lives. How can we create better places? There's a lot in here I am unsure about, but I found it a fascinating application of market theory to history.

One of the most fundamental facts of life is that where you are born is a huge determinant of how your life will turn out. Someone’s chance of leading an economically secure life is vastly higher if they happen to be born in Zurich, Seattle, or Kyoto rather than Mumbai, Nairobi, or Caracas.

• Optimize for bio cores first, silicon cores second - I am still wrapping my head around this one. The idea that developers are the bottleneck is new to me, though it shouldn't be. The abundance of AI tools coming out is making me consider this reality more. In my own life, I'm finding Cursor makes me 10-15% more effective for $20/month. That is starting to look like a steal.

That's what so many programmers have a difficult time internalizing. They are in effect very expensive biological computing cores, and the real scarce resource. Silicon computing cores are far more plentiful, and their cost keeps going down. So as every year passes, it becomes an even better deal trading compute time for programmer productivity. AI is one way of doing that, but it's also what tools like Ruby on Rails were about since the start.

• how to break up Google - I'm lucky enough to work Don and I admire his take on tech. Here he is stating the sad but true fact about breaking up Google: it must be stupid simple. While I wish our regulators could come up with more nuanced regulation for a complex company, that does not seem possible in our current climate.

Any Google breakup plan has to fit in a tweet. Google will have more total lawyer time over more years to find the gaps in a complicated plan than could ever be invested in making the plan. Keep it simple, or Google will re-consolidate the way that AT&T did. (All right, maybe not fit in a tweet, but at least get it down to one side of a piece of paper.)

• Good conversations have lots of doorknobs - I'm always looking for mental models with explanatory power. I'm using this article to update how I think about converstations, and more specifically, who I'm in conversation with.

Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”).

• When Should I Check The Mail? - I love how extra this is. Who writes an hour long article about when to check the mail? In reading the whole thing (over multiple sittings) I learned a surprising amount about statistics. Who knew there was more than just a normal distribution? Life is wild. I'm glad we've got people like this in it to keep things strange.

Bayesian decision-theoretic analysis of local mail delivery times: modeling deliveries as survival analysis, model comparison, optimizing check times with a loss function, and optimal data collection.

• The entrepreneurial state - Geography and history capture me more and more because of the fact below. Where you grow up determines so much of our lives. How can we create better places? There's a lot in here I am unsure about, but I found it a fascinating application of market theory to history.

One of the most fundamental facts of life is that where you are born is a huge determinant of how your life will turn out. Someone’s chance of leading an economically secure life is vastly higher if they happen to be born in Zurich, Seattle, or Kyoto rather than Mumbai, Nairobi, or Caracas.

• Optimize for bio cores first, silicon cores second - I am still wrapping my head around this one. The idea that developers are the bottleneck is new to me, though it shouldn't be. The abundance of AI tools coming out is making me consider this reality more. In my own life, I'm finding Cursor makes me 10-15% more effective for $20/month. That is starting to look like a steal.

That's what so many programmers have a difficult time internalizing. They are in effect very expensive biological computing cores, and the real scarce resource. Silicon computing cores are far more plentiful, and their cost keeps going down. So as every year passes, it becomes an even better deal trading compute time for programmer productivity. AI is one way of doing that, but it's also what tools like Ruby on Rails were about since the start.

• how to break up Google - I'm lucky enough to work Don and I admire his take on tech. Here he is stating the sad but true fact about breaking up Google: it must be stupid simple. While I wish our regulators could come up with more nuanced regulation for a complex company, that does not seem possible in our current climate.

Any Google breakup plan has to fit in a tweet. Google will have more total lawyer time over more years to find the gaps in a complicated plan than could ever be invested in making the plan. Keep it simple, or Google will re-consolidate the way that AT&T did. (All right, maybe not fit in a tweet, but at least get it down to one side of a piece of paper.)

• Good conversations have lots of doorknobs - I'm always looking for mental models with explanatory power. I'm using this article to update how I think about converstations, and more specifically, who I'm in conversation with.

Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”).